CESM Large Ensemble Project

The CESM Large Ensemble Project, led by Dr. Clara Deser and Dr. Jennifer Kay, is a publicly available set of climate model simulations intended for advancing understanding of internal climate variability and climate change. All simulations are performed with the nominal 1-degree latitude/longitude version of the Community Earth System Model version 1 (CESM1) with CAM5.2 as its atmospheric component. The Large Ensemble Project includes a 40-member ensemble of fully-coupled CESM1 simulations for the period 1920-2100. Each member is subject to the same radiative forcing scenario (historical up to 2005 and RCP8.5 thereafter), but begins from a slightly different initial atmospheric state (created by randomly perturbing temperatures at the level of round-off error). The Large Ensemble Project also includes a set of multi-century control simulations with the atmosphere, slab-ocean, and fully-coupled versions of CESM1 under pre-industrial (1850) radiative forcing conditions (2600 years, 900 years and 1800 years in length, respectively). Details of all model simulations may be found in Kay et al. (2015).